Is It Fair To Ask Kids To Be Heroes?

Tamara Dietrich

Let's imagine the unimaginable. Let's imagine a grown man walking into your child's classroom with a gun, unresolved issues and a to-do list from hell.

What would you want your child to do?

If he's schooled in Burleson, Texas, your child might be expected to grab his binder, his history book, his pack of highlighters or his calculator -- whatever he can lay his hands on -- and join his classmates to rush and take down the gunman.

Burleson is the school district that's been all over the news this week for its controversial policy of teaching kids to fight like lions against an armed assailant rather than submit like lambs to the slaughter.

I'm all for empowering children against monsters. For stamping out the crippling curse of "victimhood."

But there's something horrific about expecting this scale of heroism from unarmed children. "We show them they can win," an instructor with Response Options, the company providing the student training, said in a news report.

"The fact that someone walks into a classroom with a gun does not make them a god. Five or six seventh-grade kids and a 95-pound art teacher can basically challenge, bring down and immobilize a 200-pound man with a gun."

Sure they can, if the gun jams. If it doesn't, the man has nothing to lose and starts plugging whatever moves.

There goes the teacher right off. In seconds, he starts whittling down the kids. In no time, the children are so stunned from the gunfire and all that fresh blood slicking up the floor that they lose all taste for battle.

Realistically, how many seventh-graders will be left to grapple helplessly with a full-size lunatic bent on bloodlust?

At that point, he is a god.

I have my own seventh-grader and understand the drive to do whatever's necessary to keep him safe. I just don't know if expecting him to morph into Rambo under fire is realistic. Or fair.

Most schools, including those around here, tend toward the proactive: Drill on lockdowns, encourage kids to speak up before bloodshed occurs, urge parents and teachers to be alert for signs of trouble or a troubled mind, watch for suspicious characters, install hot lines and cameras and resource officers.

Last year, says Hampton schools security supervisor James Bailey, the division received a $250,000 federal grant for a school security and vulnerability assessment from the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools at the Department of Education.

The study identified ways to improve security at each school and to be more proactive, including partnering with groups outside the school.

The district plans to issue instruction books for school administrators in a month or so that will spell out what to do in any number of crises, from gunmen to tornadoes to bombs.

It doesn't include a primer on enlisting children to do the work of a SWAT team.

"It's hard to say what somebody would do in a situation where they're put in fear of serious bodily injury, or even death for that matter," Bailey said. "Hopefully, that never occurs. But are you providing more risks to the students by saying, 'We're going to train you to attack other people?' Is that going to force someone coming into the school to become more violent?

"I don't know if there's any good answer. We want kids to remain safe, and staff as well. But I don't know if teaching them to attack suspects is the best way to go. I'd probably leave that up to the experts."

In rare and terrible moments, children have risen brilliantly to the occasion.

In 1998 in Oregon, a high school wrestler with a bullet in his chest tackled a fellow student who had opened fire in the cafeteria.

Three weeks ago, a 13-year-old girl reportedly said to a gunman who had lined her and other little girls up against the wall of a one-room Amish schoolhouse: "Shoot me first."

He did.

Both these kids are heroes. And both are exceptions. They did what no rational person could have expected of them. Wracked with fear in unbearable circumstances, they dug deep and discovered astonishing courage.

"You can't train or teach someone to be a hero," said Donald Green, supervisor for security at Newport News schools. "It's something internal, and there's so many different ways of doing that.

"It's a very personal decision best made by parents and families and children who know their capabilities, who know their faith and what that would dictate. I think painting anything with a broad brush would be a mistake."

What would I want my seventh-grader to do? Fight or flee? Duck and cover?

As a mother, the mind rebels against sending babes with book bags against a Goliath with a gun.

All I would want him to do is live.

Tamara Dietrich can be reached at tdietrich@dailypress.com or 247-7892. *